Balls launches new assault on Osborne's "extreme" cuts

George Osborne's last Autumn Statement gifted Labour a new attack line after the OBR calculated that the Chancellor's plans would mean public spending falling to its lowest level as a share of GDP since the 1930s (35.2 per cent). Today, nine days ahead of Osborne's pre-election Budget, Ed Balls will launch a new assault on his opponent. In a speech at the RSA, the shadow chancellor will unveil a full analysis of what spending reductions of this size would mean for public services.

David Cameron has frequently sought to give the impression that most of the cuts have already been made. But as Balls will say in his speech, the Tories' plans mean "spending cuts larger in the next four years than in the last five years. We are not even halfway through the cuts the Tories are planning. Spending cuts which are larger than any time in post-war history - a bigger fall in spending as a share of GDP in any four year period since demobilisation at the end of the Second World War. Spending cuts which are larger than any other advanced economy in the world. More extreme than in this Parliament, the most extreme in post-war history and the most extreme internationally."

Labour's number crunchers have found that Osborne's cuts would mean the equivalent to over a third of the older people in social care losing their entitlement. "This would mean eligibility to care services further restricted, meaning hundreds of thousands of vulnerable older people missing out. It would mean even more elderly people trapped in expensive hospital beds when they don’t need to be. And it would mean even more elderly people turning to A&E because they are unable to access the care and support they need."

Balls will also warn that "at a time when the terror threat is increasing and child protection under great pressure", the Tories' plans would result in dramatic cuts to the Home Office budget: the equivalent of 29,900 police officers and 6,700 community support officers lost. The cumulative outcome would be to reduce the total number of police to below 100,000 - the smallest force since comparable records began. Balls will say: "It’s no wonder that the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said these cuts are ‘colossal’ and questioned whether they could be delivered without 'a fundamental reimagining of the role of the state'. These are extreme, risky and unprecedented cuts to policing and social care which many will see as totally undeliverable, even by this Chancellor."

For Labour, the political challenge is attacking Osborne's austerity programme while remaining committed to cuts of its own. The Greens, the SNP and Plaid Cymru will all charge the party with following the Tories' agenda. But as I've noted before, there is a significant fiscal gap between Osborne's plans and Balls's. The IFS estimates that Labour's programme would require cuts of around £7bn, compared to £33bn under the Tories'. By promising to introduce new tax rises (a 50p rate, a mansion tax, a bankers' bonus tax, a steeper bank levy), to leave room to borrow to invest and to only eliminate the current account deficit (rejecting the Tories' target of an absolute surplus), Balls has avoided the need for reductions on the scale proposed by Osborne.

He will say: "While the Tories have extreme and risky plans – an ideological second-term Conservative project to shrink the state which go far beyond the necessary task of deficit reduction. And while some other parties say we do not need to get the deficit down. Labour has a better, different, fairer and more balanced plan which means we are the centre-ground party in British politics today.

"We will cut the deficit every year and balance the books – with a surplus on the current budget and national debt as a share of GDP falling, as soon as possible in the next Parliament. And unlike the Tories we will make no unfunded commitments.

"There will need to be sensible spending cuts in non-protected areas. But we will also make fairer choices including reversing this government's £3 billion a year tax cut for the top one per cent of earners. And our plan will deliver the rising living standards and stronger growth needed to balance the books.

"The choice for the British people is now clear. A tough, but balanced and fair plan to deliver rising living standards and get the deficit down with Labour. Or an extreme and risky plan under the Tories for bigger spending cuts in the next five years than the last five years, which would cause huge damage to our vital public services."

By vowing to continue cutting even after the deficit has been eliminated, Osborne has enabled Labour to depict him as a dangerous ideologue. Balls's claim that his party now owns the "centre ground" was supported by a recent ComRes/Independent survey showing that 66 per cent do not believe that cuts should continue until the deficit has been eradicated with just 30 per cent in favour. Polls have also long shown backing for the party's pledge to impose higher taxes on the rich, such as a 50p rate of income tax and a mansion tax.

The question now is whether Osborne will do anything to neutralise Labour's attack when he rises to his feet at 12:30pm on Wednesday 18 March.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.